Electronics

IBM’s new Project Theseus shows promise and may be capable of replacing NAND altogether in the long term. Vastly higher performance and better write endurance could make this technology the next big thing in storage — provided someone agrees to manufacture it.

Nintendo, with lower-than-expected sales of both the Wii U and 3DS, has reported an annual loss of $229 million (23.2 billion yen). This is down from last year’s wea profits of around $69 million (7.1 billion yen). The company says it is establishing a new “health” division in an attempt to bolster its customer numbers and revenues. Meanwhile, analysts and pundits are vehement that Nintendo needs to fully embrace mobile gaming — as in, Mario games for smartphones — if it wants to remain relevant. In any case, Nintendo isn’t likely to right the ship any time soon: Any new health or mobile efforts will take at least a year to realize properly, and with the company yet again foregoing its E3 keynote this year, Nintendo’s agenda for 2014 probably just consists of Wii U and 3DS games.

At an event yesterday, Intel revealed the rather surprising next stage of its strategy for squeezing into the mobile market: Chromebooks! Following the failure of its smartphone efforts, and a slow start in the Windows 8 and Android tablet spaces, Intel now appears to targeting netbooks of all things. The more things change, the more things stay the same, I guess. Furthermore, not only was Google on hand at the event to trumpet its new allegiance with Intel and x86, but it also took the opportunity to stick a knife in the back of Chrome OS’s support for ARM. I wouldn’t be surprised if, as part of this renewed partnership with Intel, Chrome OS slowly shifts to an x86-only OS.

A tidbit of data released from Apple’s sapphire glass technology partner implies that the Cupertino company has locked up vital sapphire glass production technology — and it’s not planning to share anytime soon.

At its rather exclusive ARM Tech Day 2014 in Austin, the British company has given us more details on the future of its mobile efforts — in specific, its upcoming Cortex-A53 and -A57 CPU cores. ARM also said that, after passing the the $60 mark last year, the cheapest Android phones will be just $20 “in the next few months.” According to ARM, these cheap devices will cause the low- and mid-range smartphone and tablet markets to more than double over the next five years, resulting in almost 2.5 billion total mobile device shipments by 2018… and they’ll (probably) all use ARM chips.

Last week, a 1950s Cold War spy plane — the Lockheed U-2 Dragon Lady — caused hundreds of planes across the US to be grounded for an hour, and delaying hundreds more that were already airborne. The U-2, which was just minding its own business at an altitude of 60,000 feet above southern California, triggered a software bug that caused the FAA’s air traffic control system to “overload” and shut down. The backup system also failed, presumably for similar reasons. The beautiful irony is that both the plane and the air traffic control software were created by Lockheed. How did an ancient plane that has been trawling the skies for almost 60 years cause such a catastrophic failure?

Now that Oculus has Mark Zuckerberg as a sugar-daddy, it seems that ZeniMax wants in on some of that sweet Facebook cash. John Carmack’s former employer is claiming that Oculus VR is unfairly using its intelectual property, and it’s threatening to take action. John Carmack and the Oculus team quickly and publicly rebutted ZeniMax’s claims, but the legal situation is bound to get even stickier from here.

There was a time, in computing’s not-so-distant past, where magnetic tape was the best way to back up large amounts of data. In the mid-90s, tape could store tens or hundreds of gigabytes, while hard drive capacities were still mostly measured in megabytes. That would soon change, of course, with the advent of writable optical media and cheap, large hard drives, but even today tape drives still hang around as one of the best options for mass data backup. Now, Sony has developed a new technology that pushes tape drives far beyond where they once were, leading to individual tapes with 185 terabytes of storage capacity.

After being continuously inhabited for more than 13 years, it is finally possible to log into Ustream and watch the Earth spinning on its axis in glorious HD. This video feed (embedded below) comes from from four high-definition cameras, delivered by last month’s SpaceX CRS-3 resupply mission, that are attached to the outside of the International Space Station. You can open up the Ustream page at any time, and as long as it isn’t night time aboard the ISS, you’ll be treated to a beautiful view of the Earth from around 250 miles (400 km) up.

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